INTRODUCTION

My task is to rebrand UK COAL and its departments. I also must make shure that the logos resemble like they are part of a family. I must create 4 brochures relating to the company and its 4 departments with additional assests such as comp slips.

BP-the early years and beyond

Before it was a brand name, BP was just a simple product range. In 1917 British cans of motor fuel that had previously been sold under the enigmatic label ‘Palm Tree Oil’ from what i disscovered and were then marketed as ‘BP’, short for British Petroleum.
The company itself wouldn’t be called BP for at least another 40 years, but BP quickly captured motorists’ imaginations, both in Britain and across Europe. Many letters appeared in advertisements, on the pumps and on the sides of delivery trucks. 

A Mr Saunders from the purchasing department at BP won an employee competition in 1920 which was to design the first BP mark, a boxy ‘B’ and ‘P’ with wings on their edges, set into the outline of a shield, a very interesting idea if may say so.

For a while the colours inside the shield could be almost anything: red, blue, black, green, yellow, white and to be honest very confusing but could work if each color represented a different division in BP. Actually this could be easily used for UK COAL because UK coal has 4 divisions and a color coded logo would definitely be useful to me.

 But by the time executives sent a letter to subsidiaries in the 1930s asking them all to use a consistent house sign rather than how they felt at the time, green and yellow were the nominated colors. A wise choice as green is a positive and yellow is safety.

Precisely how these distinctive colours came to stand for BP is in my opinion is the greatest mystery of its time as no one knows. At any rate i believe it was the French that introduced the color scheme in 1923, followed shortly thereafter by the Swiss. In Britain the first BP petrol pumps and trucks were bright red, which drew the eyes of some in the countryside who said they spoiled the views. The repainted green pumps blended in better with the scenery and didn't have that red shock factor, my logo should either be green related are the traditional black and yellow for the coal UK.

There is quite a lot of potential in the BP logo as it would work well with a color code for oil and so on...

COAL UK could have a different color for each different section, for example:

Surface mining - light grey   

Deep mining - black

Corporate - yellow

H. estates - green

FORGE OF STEEL - forgemasters

BRIEF BACKGROUND

Sheffield Forgemasters is the successor to such famous Sheffield names such as Vickers, English Steel, Firth Brown and British Steel. Forgemasters is an heavy industry company that manufactures some of the best steel available on the planet from steel ingots. In 1850 Sheffield produced some 35,000 tons of steel - more than half of world production.

The origins of the company go back to the 1750s. However it was Edward Vickers, a traditional miller owning a water mill on Millsands, close to the centre of Sheffield, together with other members of his and the Naylor family who really set the foundations for the business in 1805.
Vickers exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851 making a vast steel ingot - the largest ever in its time - weighing in at 24cwts. More than 40 crucible heats were required for the ingot and other works in the Millsands area provided crucibles of molten steel.
In 1856 Henry Bessemer patented the first bulk steel-making process whereby several tons of steel could be produced in less than one hour. Within a few years bulk steel production would be the city's mainstay. John Brown built the Atlas Works on farmland immediately east of the city, closely followed by Vickers giant River Don Works in 1865. The company has had quite a rollacoster ride mainly due to the cyclical demand for specialist forgings and castings.

Anyway, the logo of forge-masters is fantastic because it could easily be seen as a flower or poppy, poppy relating more towards the armaments made at the factory during the war. The logo is in 4 parts and could possibly be modified to be used for COAL UK, its not to simple and has many possibilities for its use.

The impression i collected from researching forge-masters i hoped would help give me an inspiration or two because the UK COAL brief was my choice and forge-masters is a heavy industrial business similar to coal.

Not to mention that forge-masters has an absolutely fantastic brand. The font is simplistic with an hint of history. But honestly, there's no feeling of it being a steel company.

On the other hand, the logo compliments the typeface to some degree but the typeface is what i think lets it down a little bit. 

The chart below is really useful as UK COAL requires different divisions within the company such as surface mining, deep mining and not to forget Harworth estates. But from studying and dissecting the forge-masters logo i really think this has helped me start developing because by the process of elimination, i will eventually uncover my logo hidden within.

This quote explains what i mean: -Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it


-The best design is when you can no longer take away anything more.

PICTURE SECTION-assets

IMAGES

Each image can relate to an area of UK COAL such as housing and agriculture not to mention the mining.
Appropriate images for the job.

FINALS

By using the research i found and did, i simply removed the final idea from the existing UK COAL logo, the triangle worked in the infographs to create a fur tree, and also worked as a rotary blade. Each triangle points to the middle which also is subliminal like fed-ex because something is created when the triangles are not quite connected. A rotary blade for either a wind-farm or a rotary blade for mining, i thought it was quite clever but you decide what you think it is or what it possibly could be.



















         
















The green triangle represents the estates because the green is a positive color, also building, restoring, developing and turning waste land into a natural beauty spot. See... all positives improving the image of UK COAL, basically giving it a new face-lift.